JumpSocial Blog

I just came across this article because it was SlashDotted recently.

I’ts an article by Derek Sivers on his experience with Ruby. He is involved with www.CDBaby.com.

Here is the article.

Here is some of the text:

7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails
Saturday September 22, 2007 5:49PM

SUMMARY: I spent two years trying to make Rails do something it wasn�??t meant to do, then realized my old abandoned language (PHP, in my case) would do just fine if approached with my new Rails-gained wisdom.

INTRO / BACKGROUND:

Back in January 2005, I announced on the O�??Reilly blog that I was going to completely scrap over 100,000 lines of messy PHP code in my existing CD Baby (cdbaby.com) website, and rewrite the entire thing in Rails, from scratch.

I hired one of the best Rails programmers in the world (Jeremy Kemper aka bitsweat), and we set off on this huge task with intensity. The first few months showed good progress, and Jeremy could not have been more amazing, twisting the deep inner guts of Rails to make it do things it was never intended to do.

But at every step, it seemed our needs clashed with Rails�?? preferences. (Like trying to turn a train into a boat. It�??s do-able with a lot of glue. But it�??s damn hard. And certainly makes you ask why you�??re really doing this.)

Two years (!) later, after various setbacks, we were less than halfway done.* (To be fair to Jeremy�??s mad skillz: many setbacks were because of tech emergencies that pulled our attention to other internal projects that were not the rewrite itself.) The entire music distribution world had changed, and we were still working on the same goddamn rewrite. I said fuckit, and we abandoned the Rails rewrite. Jeremy took a job with 37 Signals, and that was that.

I didn�??t abandon the rewrite IDEA, though. I just asked myself one important question:

�??Is there anything Rails can do, that PHP CAN�??T do?�?�

The answer is no.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 23rd, 2007 at 11:03 pm and is filed under JumpSocial Technology, General Interest, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.